Louis
Place
Carolyn Lazard: Dependency, Capacity, Necessity or How to Make an Access Rider
Monday, June 9 2025
10am PT / 12pm CT / 1pm ET / 7pm CET
via zoom / sliding scale registration here
This session is for anyone who wants to come together and think through the relationship between dependency, necessity, and capacity as artists, writers, workers, caregivers, and friends. Carolyn will share texts and artworks that consider the materiality of access and care, followed by prompts to help you develop your own access rider—a document that articulates the specific needs, boundaries, and terms of engagement for your creative labor. While riders are often associated with performing arts tours (like Mariah Carey's reasonable request for 20 white kittens and 100 white doves), access riders are useful for anyone navigating institutional relationships.
Rather than accept how institutional in/capacity sets the terms of engagement, we will consider how we negotiate these complex relationships and how an access rider can clarify our own needs and in/capacities. Together, we will outline the kinds of support—financial, physical, emotional, or logistical—you require for yourself and your work. This might involve asking for a specific pay rate, having your work published on accessible platforms, maintaining intellectual copyright, confirming ADA-accessible lodging for travel, or refusing police presence at your events.
We'll explore questions like: What aesthetic forms might be produced through need and incapacity? What does support actually look like for your creative process? What in life is actually beyond measure, invaluable, and also held in common?
More broadly, we'll unpack the relationship between your care and labor. As creative industries demand more, faster, for less, how do we resist institutional extraction while continuing to do our work in ways that feel best? While we don't always control the means of production or the institutions that facilitate the making of our work, we can name the terms of our labor—if we don't create the terms, someone else will do it for us.
By the end of the session, you'll begin drafting your own access rider for navigating the often invisible demands of creative work.
Image Credit: Carolyn Working, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.